[Dialogue] Sins of Scripture Spong

[KroegerD at aol.com]

June 27 2007 
This is Not the Word of  the Lord!  

I went to my own parish church on a Sunday in June. The music was excellent.  
The sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. James Jones, an honorary and part time  
member of the staff of St. Peter's Church in Morristown, New Jersey, was one 
of  the best I have heard in years. The summer congregation was relaxed, 
casually  dressed and friendly. The only thing wrong with that worship service 
turned out  to be the Bible. What a strange indictment. One of the three lessons 
from the  Bible that Sunday was so dreadful that I first cringed as I heard it 
read, then  I railed against it silently. What I really wanted to do was to 
shout loudly:  "That is not true."  
There is throughout the Christian Church a great deal of adulation attached  
to the Bible. My parish seems to be moving in that direction. Before the 
gospel  is read a procession carries the Bible (literally the gospels), held high, 
into  the center of the congregation with the people turning in expectation. 
When  lessons are read from the Bible the reader normally concludes the reading 
with  the words: "This is the Word of the Lord!" to which the people 
dutifully respond  like well-trained sheep: "Thanks be to God." When the gospel is 
read, the clergy  make the sign of the cross on the printed page, cross 
themselves, and then sign  with a cross their mind, lips and heart, while announcing 
that this is "The Holy  Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." When the 
Gospel reading is  complete, the reader proclaims "This is the Gospel of the 
Lord." All of these  well practiced liturgical acts were designed over the years 
to surround the  Bible with authority, to enhance the power of scripture and 
to train the minds  of the lay people to revere the Bible. Christians have been 
taught consciously  and subconsciously not to confront or to challenge 
something for which God's  authorship is being claimed. Most of these liturgical 
practices are now rather  meaningless to me and I neither enjoy them nor 
encourage them, seeing them  simply as weak attempts to encourage bibliolatry. I am 
not now and have not been  for years prepared to acknowledge that the words of 
the Bible are in fact the  words of God in any literal sense. In worship, 
therefore, when I hear a biblical  passage read that portrays God as a kind of 
monster, whose behavior would not be  recognized as moral by any standard today, I 
am offended. To make a bad  situation worse, the liturgical forms of the 
Episcopal Church direct me not only  listen to this dreadful biblical material, 
but also suggest that the reader must  pronounce this offensive passage to be 
the "Word of God." I want to replace my  expected response of "Thanks be to God" 
with a loud NO! NO! NO! That, however,  would not be either proper or 
understandable behavior for a retired bishop, so I  simply whisper my objection just 
loud enough for my wife to hear. The lesson  read on that Sunday could never 
be the Word of God" for me.  
What was the offending passage that bothered me so viscerally? It was the  
conclusion to the story of David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, which 
 was coupled with David's conspiracy to have Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, 
murdered  on the battlefield. The narrative continues by informing us that David 
was  confronted by the prophet Nathan, armed only with a sense of the 
righteousness  of God, who forced David to acknowledge his wrong doing. Nathan's tactic 
was to  tell a story in which another person has acted in a similar manner to 
the way  David had acted. Upon hearing this story the Bible says that King 
David's anger  was kindled against this villainy and he proclaimed that the 
person who had  acted this way was worthy of death. Then Nathan the prophet, in an 
act of rare  courage, looked at the King and said to David" "Thou art the 
man!" David had in  fact condemned his own behavior.  
What is so offensive or so wrong about that, you ask. Well, nothing so far.  
The story, however, moves on and the prophet Nathan spells out the punishment  
that God will inflict. God, said Nathan in this narrative, was going to slay 
the  child conceived in this adulterous relationship. God was going to make 
this  child's life the payment required for the sin of David and Bathsheba. That 
was  the dreadful lesson from the Bible that this well-trained Episcopal  
congregation, would declare to be the "Word of God."  
My offense was not caused by a lack of conviction on my part that both  
adultery and murder are wrong and should not be condoned. The question about the  
absence of morality found in this biblical passage lay solely in the 
implication  that God's decision to destroy the baby born of this adulterous 
relationship was  in any sense proper. That idea, so clear in this text and so morally 
bankrupt,  was why I wanted to scream in protest.  
What kind of God is this? That was my question. Why should the innocent child 
 be destroyed for the sins of the child's parents? Where is there any sense 
of  justice in this presumably divine act? For centuries the Christian Church  
treated those children it called "illegitimate" as pariahs, sometimes not even 
 allowing them to be baptized. Church leaders apparently believed themselves 
to  be following the clear teaching of the Bible.  
There was, perhaps, one other thing that made me particularly sensitive to  
the horror of this biblical passage as I heard it being read on this Sunday  
morning. I found myself sitting in our church about four rows behind a family  
consisting of two parents and their only daughter about whom I care deeply, so 
I  was watching them as the lesson was read. Less than a year ago this family 
lost  their vivacious and lively, twenty-four year old daughter and older 
sister in a  mountain climbing accident. That young woman had been a favorite of 
mine since  she was a small child. The news of her death was heartrending to me 
and I could  only imagine the pain her parents and sister endured, and yet 
here they were in  their church listening to a lesson from the Bible which 
implied that God might  cause a child to die as a way of punishing the parents. 
Such a God, in my  opinion, could only be viewed as demonic.  
I have been a pastor for more than fifty years. I know that among the most  
destructive and debilitating elements in human grief is guilt. There is in 
human  tragedy almost an inevitable question that is raised: "What did I do to 
deserve  this?" Why was my child punished with death, or why was I punished with 
my  child's death? It is a question rising out of a seriously flawed theology, 
by  which many people are violated. This theology defines God as a punishing 
judge  who delights in exacting a literal pound of flesh from those defined as 
sinful.  The assumption is also present that this God operates on a fairness 
principle  dispensing rewards and punishments.  
As I heard this lesson read that morning my mind also ranged back to another  
family that lost a child. Early in my priestly career an eleven year old girl 
in  my congregation received a leukemia diagnosis. She died within a year. I 
knew  this child and her parents well. They were not just church members but 
also  close friends. This child's father was a middle management executive and 
her  mother was a homemaker, a status in that small town thought to be a mark 
of  social rank. This family was indeed upwardly mobile. Their roots, however, 
were  quite humble. As children both of them had been members of a 
Pentecostal  Holiness Church that served a working class, not very well educated,  
congregation. Their minister was a fundamentalist who constantly railed against  
the sins of the flesh, proclaiming God's condemnation of sexual sins in  
particular and suggesting that anyone who deviated from God's path of  righteousness 
as revealed in scripture should expect to receive God's wrath.  This little 
girl's parents had, they believed, violated that rule as their  first-born 
daughter had been conceived out of wedlock. They felt the full  disapproval of both 
sets of their parents and of their Pentecostal church  community. They dealt 
with this crisis by arranging a hasty marriage, hoping  that this step might 
mute the punishment that they were quite sure God had in  store for them. For a 
long time guilt was their daily bread. They, nevertheless,  established their 
home, the new father managed to get his college degree despite  the economic 
pressure that parenthood placed on this family. His career  prospered and a 
promotion took them to a new town where they had a new start.  Other children 
followed. Eventually, they joined the Episcopal Church. It was  for them a very 
different, even a healing experience. Their future looked  bright. Then came 
their daughter's sickness, her diagnosis and finally her  death. Their grief 
was not only overwhelming, but their repressed guilt and the  God of their youth 
also came rushing back with a vengeance. They interpreted  their daughter's 
death as that almost expected vengeful act of a punishing God.  God had waited, 
they thought, for them to reach this new place in life and then  God struck. 
Their "sin" had caused the death of their child. Irrational it was,  but also 
powerful in its demonic terror. Rationality is always a casualty of  emotion. 
Each relieved his or her guilt by blaming the other. The stress was  more than 
the marriage could take. Within a year of their daughter's death, they  
separated. A literal Bible told them quite clearly that God had killed the child  
of David and Bathsheba, conceived in an adulterous relationship, as a 
punishment  for their sins. I watched these lives being destroyed by the words of 
scripture  to which they attributed ultimate truth. Having lived through that 
experience  with that couple I can no longer keep silent as the dark side of the 
Bible and  the negative theistic definitions of God claim another victim, 
distort another  life, fill decent people with the fear of judgment, and make guilt 
the primary  gift of the Church to its people.  
That approach to the Bible must be challenged as must the debilitating  
message that so many hear in church. The Bible is filled with dark, unlearned  
themes that in the hands of "the righteous" give rise to an abusive use. It has  
in its pages what I have called: "The Sins of Scripture." It is time for the  
Christian Church to say that publicly, openly, honestly.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Tschlau at Fairpoint.net, writes:  
Where can I find the hymns, etc. written to express the beliefs your writings 
 have developed?  
Dear Tschlau,  
The hymns for which you search are available but sometimes you have to look  
very hard to find them. Hymnals are important aids in most worship services 
but  they are also expensive, so they cannot be reproduced much more than once 
or  twice a century. My own church revised its hymnal in 1942 and again in 
1983. If  all churches would move to big screens on which the words of the hymns 
could be  displayed, this deterrent to good music would be removed.  
The 1983 edition of my church's hymnal was chaired by one of our great church 
 musicians, Raymond F. Glover, who had experience as organist and choirmaster 
in  many churches (including St. Paul's in Richmond, Virginia), as well as by 
being  the Professor of both Church Music and Voice at one of our principle 
seminaries.  Ray is also a first rate church liturgist and that talent aided 
him greatly in  his quest to bring some exciting new music to Episcopal pews. 
Nonetheless, that  commission was surrounded by the weight of traditional church 
music from  medieval plainsong to 19th century piety and 20th century social 
gospel themes.  Because hymnbooks must be broad in their appeal, there is also 
in our latest  hymnal some of the music of what came to be called the renewal 
movement.  
I still believe that most hymnody has not yet embraced the theological  
revolution that has occurred in the past 100 years. Very few of our hymns  reflect 
this shift in understanding God from "a being up there or out there" to  what 
Paul Tillich called "the ground of being." Very few have escaped the "fall"  
mentality of "original sin" or sacrifice mentality of rescue theology, all of  
which has been rendered inoperative in a post Darwinian world. One of the  
reasons for this is that very few hymns have yet been written that engage these  
contemporary themes.  
I like the work of Fred Kaan in England, who was one of the most prolific  
hymn writers of the last century. I look for his hymns in the hymnals of every  
church I visit. None of them are in the Episcopal hymnbooks yet. I also 
greatly  enjoy, even treasure, the hymnal of the United Church of Canada that is 
called  Voices United as well as the official hymnal of the United Church of 
Christ in  America. Those two publications have made the best effort to get beyond 
the  "Atonement Theology" that focuses on death, blood and sacrifice that 
plagues so  many hymn books.  
I hope this helps. I encourage you and all my readers who are so inclined to  
examine the possibility that you might be one who can write the hymns the 
Church  needs both today and tomorrow.  
John Shelby Spong 



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